Welcoming Marta Cenedese to the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities

Marta's project, ‘From “Small Stories” to “Communities of Care” With/In Narratives of Illness and Death’ (SMALLCOMM), aims to explore how recent narratives of illness, death and bereavement are located at the intersection of community networks and narrativized by communities. Central to the project is the notion of ‘communities of care’, where ‘care’ indicates an affective, ordinary activity that is relational, reciprocal, and structurally emancipative, and which is understood to be intersectional, transnational, transmedial, and inclusive.

The project uses a mixed methods approach, aiming to create an analytical framework that holds together literary-textual analysis of published narratives and an empirical exploration of the ‘small stories’ of individuals within their community contexts. Indeed, with this project Marta hopes to include more creative methods into her research by learning how to facilitate workshops on group reading, creative writing, and collage.

Originally from Italy, Marta has a background in modern languages and literary studies from the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari and Sciences-Po Paris, and completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge. After a career break, she worked as a researcher in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku (Finland), first as a fellow of the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) and most recently within the project INTERACT: Intersectional Reading, Social Justice and Literary Activism (funded by Kone Foundation). At Turku, she was also the co-convenor of the Selma Medical Humanities Seminar Series, which ran for three seasons between January 2021 and June 2022. She is an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin, and has been a visiting fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Humboldt University Berlin (2020) and at the Centre d’Histoire, Sciences-Po Paris (2023).